Uses for Isotopes With Different Half-lives
Physics: AQA GCSE Higher, topic 4.2.21
Uses for Isotopes With Different Half-lives
Different radioactive isotopes have different half-lives that make them suitable for different uses.
Iodine-123
- Iodine-123 has a half-life of 13.2 hours.
- This makes it suitable for treating cancerous cells.
- Because its half-life is so short, Iodine-123 doesn’t do much damage to healthy cells after the treatment is done.
Iodine-131
- Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days. This means it can be used in medical tracers to see how well the thyroid gland is working.
- Iodine-131 has a long enough half-life for us to monitor (watch) how well the gland is functioning (working) over a good period of time.
- At the same time, the amount of harm caused is limited as the patient does not need to receive extra doses.
Radiotherapy
- Radiotherapy can kill cells and destroy tissue inside the body.
- In radiotherapy, high doses of radiation can kill mutated cells (cancers), but the radiation can also kill healthy cells.
Test yourself on Uses for Isotopes With Different Half-lives
What is the half life of Iodine-123?
Why would we use radiation with a long half life in medical treatment?
If you wanted to track something in the body for a long period of time, which radiation would be most appropriate?